Transcription
Every city determines, to a very large extent, the amount of energy used by its inhabitants. Right. We tend to think of energy use as a behavioral thing, but really enormous amounts of our energy use are sort of predestined by the kinds of communities and cities that we live in.
If you look, for example, at transportation—a major category of climate emissions—there is a direct relationship between how dense a city is and the amount of climate emissions that its residents spew out into the air. The correlation, of course, is that denser places tend to have lower emissions. But when we live in a denser community, suddenly what we find, of course, is that the things we need are close by. Since the most sustainable trip is the one that you never had to make in the first place, but suddenly our lives become instantly more sustainable.
It is possible, of course, to increase the density of the communities around us. Some places are doing this with new eco-districts, developing whole new sustainable neighborhoods, which is nice work if you can get it. But most of the time what we're talking about is, in fact, reweaving the urban fabric that we already have. So we're talking about things like infill development, really sharp little changes to where we have buildings; where we're developing urban retrofitting, creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there.
Increasingly, we're realizing that we don't even need to densify an entire city. What we need instead is an average density that rises to a level where we don't drive as much, and so on. That can be done by raising the density in very specific spots a whole lot. Right. So you can think of it as tent poles that actually raise the density of the entire city. We find that when we do that, we can, in fact, have a few places that are really hyper-dense within a wider fabric of places that are perhaps a little more comfortable and achieve the same results.
Now, we may find that there are places that are really, really dense and still hold onto their cars. But the reality is that, by and large, what we see when we get a lot of people together with the right conditions is a threshold effect where people simply stop driving as much. Increasingly more and more people, if they're surrounded by places that make them feel at home, give up their cars altogether. This is a huge, huge energy savings because what comes out of our tailpipe is really just, you know, the beginning of the story with climate emissions from cars. We have the manufacturer of the car, the disposal of the car, all of the parking and freeways, and so on. When you can get rid of all of those because somebody doesn't use any of them, really, you find that you can actually cut transportation emissions as much as 90%.
People are embracing this all around the world. We're seeing more and more people embrace this sort of walk-shed life. People are saying that it's moving from the idea of the dream home to the dream neighborhood.